As much as I loved the first printing of Irish Firebrands in paperback, there’s nothing quite like seeing it in hardbound form!

Two hardback copies of Irish Firebrands visit their friends in my Irish research bookcase. (The bookcase is made of real oak, five feet high, and there are two more full shelves to it; some of the shelves have two rows of books on them, and two more double-row shelves of Irish books live on the other side of the room, at my computer desk. Am I an anorak?)

The new dust cover makes an eye-catching presentation, whether it’s face up on a table, or spine outward on a shelf. The text is printed on cream paper in graceful Garamond font with American Uncial accents (chapter numbers, page headings and page numbers), and the lines are spaced at the classic distance for ease of reading. The boards are bound in dark-blue linen, with the spine labeled in gold leaf, and with its traditional frontispiece map (and a bonus central illustrated section to provide a brief intermission), it holds its own with the best that printing presses have produced for the past 200 years.

Although it has more pages, plus the flyleaves and linen-bound boards, it weighs the same as the single-volume soft cover, but this does not constitute the same kind of disadvantage that the weight and thickness give to a paperback, because the flexibility of a hardbound spine permits the book to lie flat when open on a reader’s lap or a table.

What I don’t like about it is what the list price is required to be, just in order for all of the retail outlet middlemen to take their cut. It’s in the same range as the list prices for a few of the newer hardcover First World War nonfiction books I’ve bought recently, but that’s a specialty subject. For fiction – even for a 200,000-word epic like Irish Firebrands – it seems artificially inflated, and at that, if any lovely reader does buy one from a hand-in-the-till retailer, I will net less than 3% of the list price.

The goodnews is that readers will be able to buy the hardbound printing of Irish Firebrands at the Lulu Storefor a much more reasonable 20% off list (which results in a price more in line with traditionally published hard cover fiction), and I will receive a realistic return for all my work.

Indie Author-Publisher colleagues: I’ve begged you before, on behalf of readers like myself who have visual disabilities, to print your books in paperback as well as to publish them digitally. I renew that request here, and I present a challenge: Do yourselves a favor, and print deluxe editions of your works in hard cover, too. Treat your writing with the respect it deserves, by giving it a presentation of which you can be proud, and which will compete on equal terms with traditionally published fiction, in a format that will increase its endurance on a reader’s bookshelf.